Tuesday, 28 March 2017

and takes the p ush of clouds & distant
land into the text ure of corn's matt talk

Some of these gaps are between words, denoting a pause or break that's rather less than a line-break (they sometimes replace commas, or they're like the gaps in anglo-saxon verse). Poets not usually considered avant-garde sometimes use such gaps too - for example, Kim Moore's "Some People" (in "The Art of Falling") and Liz Berry's "Bird" (in "Black Country") use them. The gaps within words are more challenging. "In Tears in the Fence" (No. 65) Mark Goodwin writes about what he describes as his gappy poetry - "with the development of the gappy poetry there was never really an aim, not an an intention, certainly not to begin with. It was all about play". I can see that the gaps allow a little Joycean wordplay, bringing out new meanings. There's disruption too, stopping the reader using a standard novel-reading method of processing - letters rather than words need to be processed, and the 2nd line's "ing" will cause most readers to backtrack. In the 4th line, readers are likely to sense "text of [the] talk" and "corn stalk".

Having written the poetry, he later thought about the style -

as I thought about it, and tried to analyse what I was doing, and no doubt also constructed reasons for what I was doing, I began to see, especially as most of my gappy poetry is concerned with landscape and place, that this gappy form has much to do with the way we continually attempt to read and reinterpret the layers of our worlds … and how we get from one layer of landscape to another, how we go over horizons, how we get from one valley to another. We go via gaps, gaps in hedges, or via a col, or pass, or gap between mountains. What is a path but a form of gap - a strip of place where material has been worn away

words on the page are governed by the gaps … By re-arranging the gaps, and adding gaps, you are still left with the base-layer interpretation/score/material of the original poem (or landscape) before the procedure was imposed on it, but you also have a new surface that reveals, from a new angle, or point of view, or position of hearing, some of the pure sound or music of language detached from what we usually experience as familiar speech, and also you get sudden shifts in meaning, all generated by moving or adding space(s)

Perhaps I can say that my gappy poems happen to be a particular pattern at a particular time, but that the gaps can lead on or rather invite another reader-maker to break the poem (or even world) down again, and re-map as they will

So,

gaps aren't necessarily a lack of something, they can be a means of going from one place to another (a corridor, an airlock) or a space waiting to be filled - he writes "I often approach writing poetry … much as a painter might approach a canvas, and also in some ways how a dancer might approach and proceed across a floor")

gaps can destablize the readers' attempt to organise their sensory input into layers. It does so without making the original text inaccessible

gaps offer the reader more interactive play between the parts

These aims aren't new of course.

Influences/precedents

Line-breaks - Much of what applies to using line-breaks also applies to gaps - if poetry is cut-up prose, then gappy poetry is cut-up poetry (see my The End of the Line for Modern Poetry article). Linebreaks have lost their power to disrupt, but gaps haven't. Rosmarie Waldrop wrote that "Perhaps the greatest challenge of the prose poem (as opposed to "flash fiction") is to compensate for the absence of the margin. I try to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text. I cultivate cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference, etc. 'Gap gardening,' I have called it"

Mimetic expression -
Olson proposed that nuances of breath and motion to be conveyed to the reader through typographical means. Gaps are an obvious means.

Negative space - rather than looking at the gaps, one can look at the clusters thus formed, and consider how the gaps create a framing effects - "Typographic isolation does not "emphasize"; it frames, rendering a familiar word or phrase momentarily unfamiliar ... Emphasis limits the range of possible meanings", Stephen Cushman, "William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure", Yale, p.60

Clustering - words are in sentences, grouped into clauses determined by syntax. The freedom to move words around on the page provides a different way to create word clusters. The idea is similar to the use of phonemes - matching phonemes can be spread amongst words not connected by syntax - or how a realist painting can sometimes be viewed as an abstract - a "study in blue" where the blueness by chance belongs to various objects.

Disruption -
In "Broken English" (Wesleyan Univ Press, 1993), Heather McHugh points out that "[Poetry] is a broken language from the beginning, brimming with non-words: all that white ... the making of lines is the breaking of lines ... All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn ... The poem is not only a piece, like other pieces of art; it is a piece full of pieces".
In informational prose, letters or sounds create words which in turn have meanings that a sentence organises into higher meanings (see my Ingarden and the Sense of Resolution article). Disruption of this mode of comprehension can remind people of the arbitrariness of spellings, classifications, etc. of course, it's not a new idea - e.g. "The radical indentations [in "Tintern Abbey"] let space into the verse column at irregular interval, signaling the abrupt discontinuities and shifts associated with the Romantic ode", Stephen Cushman, ("William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure", Yale, p.57). But such disruption seems to me the moon/June, love/dove of modern poetry - easy to do, with a deadened effect through over-use.
That said, Ralf Webb writes of Emily Berry's poems that "Several of these use “tabulation”; large blank spaces appear mid-line, as if the poems’ sutures had been ripped out, creating irregular, staccato, breathless rhythms, so that to read them is to enact and experience the urgency of the speaker’s appeals" showing how gaps can produce a different effect to that of line-breaks.

Readings

"Spacing in poetry is nothing to do with space and everything to do with time" wrote John Fuller in "Who Is Ozymandias? and other puzzles in poetry" (Chatto and Windus, 2011, p.22). When poetry is read out, it can be hard to hear where the line-breaks are. Nevertheless, poetry readings often successful, bringing into question the importance of the line-breaks. What about gaps?

Mark Goodwin wrote "Encountering my gappy poetry as a reader is of course completely different to encountering it as a listener, and not least because when performing the gappy poems to a live audience I tend to read the poems twice, in different ways: once honouring the gaps, reading in a very clipped style; and once reading the poem without honouring the gaps, and generally by reading in a more natural way. I've found that an audience that might be driven away by the appearance of the gappy poems on the page, once they've heard the two differing but connected musical versions of a gappy poem, well, they 'get' it. That's not a 'get it' so much to do with 'understanding', but rather they 'receive' the music"

I'd like more evidence, but it's an interesting observation.

Mind the gap?

End-rhymes add an effect, but usually at a cost. If gaps offer extra effects without consequences we'd all be using them (in the way that poets use line-breaks nowadays, there being nothing to lose). While we're at it we might as well use coloured text and multiple fonts - they too add meaning-laden features without destroying the original. But we don't.

When New Formalists write about the positive effects of rhyme they usually don't mention disadvantages. Similarly it's not surprising that those who promote gaps don't list their disadvantages -

they distract the reader from considering "meaning" (visual effects are often considered more superficial than "meaning")

the use of gimmicks (uncommon notation) can put readers off (gaps aren't common - they still seem rather quirky)

the use of apparently random devices can put readers off

Even some practitioners have doubts. In an interview Emily Berry says that "These spaces appeared initially as a way of indicating a kind of stutter or inability to speak/write except in a fragmented way (which is probably a textual representation of how I feel when trying to talk about emotions!). They started appearing in other poems I wrote, mainly the ones about dealing with absence and I guess you could also see them as symbolising the way in which someone’s absence can seem so physical. I don’t seem to be using them so much any more. I like the way they give you a bit more freedom in terms of line breaks, but they’re also quite annoying to work with, you end up spending ages deciding how many spaces a particular gap should be, which is not the greatest use of one’s time".

In "Tears in the fence" No.65 Mark Goodwin's "Mind Will" is quoted from -

Sunday, 23 October 2016

Poets are a clan, a secret society. One poet reading another will as likely trust them. But to prose readers, poets are strangers. An atmosphere of trust needs to be fostered by the poet otherwise the reader will just shut the door in the poet's face. Readers need to be convinced that the effort of reading will be repaid. A collection of poetry offers the poet an opportunity to develop a trusting relationship. The reader might come to assume that some poems share a persona, so assumptions can be made about the persona's gender, era, location, sexual orientation, etc - factors that complicate interpretation of poems when they're read in isolation. As readers continue reading, they might find shared understandings and shed suspicions of there being any Emperor's New Clothes. They might feel that they're getting to know the poet. Some poets (Sharon Olds maybe, or some Confessionalists) encourage or even require such an engagement by the reader, a commitment for richer and for poorer.

But suppose the poet seems untrustworthy? In real life when introduced to new people we sometimes encounter similar situations, meeting people who seem to be bad judges of character, whose opinions fly against evidence, who contradict themselves, who talk too much, who exaggerate, who are pretentious or incoherent. None of these traits of course is sufficient to sever all contact with the person - they may be interesting and likeable nonetheless. Even if they're not, you may have to interact with them - they may be new colleagues or in-laws; they may be sitting next to you on a long flight. You make allowances, even if the people are a little strange. Indeed, strange people are often rather interesting to people who read poetry, especially if their use of language is strange too.

Is all non-standard language poetic? Of course not. Indeed it's barely a meaningful question. And yet, within each domain of language use, a poetic element can be brought out. Perhaps it's easier to see the poetry when it's in an unusual context. Away from the familiar poetry patterns, rhymes, metaphors, and emotions, there's potential in recipes, adverts, specialist jargon, shopping lists and rants of the mad. This relocation (often removing the purpose from usually purposeful language) draws attention to the strangeness of language.

Any breaking of the word=world equivalence, any doubts raised on the transparency of language, can be considered poetic. The disruption may be minimal. For example, in one of her poems Jo Bell writes about "disappearing her toes in the sand". Making an intransitive verb into a transitive one in this way doesn't make the text harder to understand, but does make the text more likely to be considered a poem.

The most poetic non-standard language comes perhaps from people with mental disorders. In his 1911 book, Bleuler (who coined the term schitzophrenia) quoted this much-quoted passage that exhibits some non-standard traits - "I always liked geography. My last teacher in that subject was Professor August A. He was a man with black eyes. I also like black eyes. There are also blue eyes and grey eyes and other sorts, too. I have heard it said that snakes have green eyes. All people have eyes."

When people are in a manic phase their language is affected. There's likely to be

an increased use of pronouns and verbs at the expense of adjectives and prepositions. Speech is likely to be I-oriented

more circumstantial, anecdotal or random links between phrases

more discursive and verbose discourse. More loose ends.

These features can make a manic person more tedious to be with. The resulting isolation can worsen their problems. With high-functioning manics these features are no less tedious, but at least there are more compensations. Other non-standard personality features that affect language may also be present -

Quirks and idiosyncrasies

Disinhibition

This disinhibition (which makes it possible to say things that one wouldn't normally), coupled with the greater variety of links between ideas, aids creativity, so it's not surprising that there's a similarity between manic language and some styles of poetry. Those with borderline symptoms may be encouraged to be conventional, or (if writers) try to write a normal piece with a mad person as the main character. Alternatively, rather than change the writer to fit society, new surroundings can be found to suit the writer. The poetry world is one such world, confessionalism being a tempting style. The world of poetry offers opportunities to legitimize behaviour that would otherwise be considered anti-social or rude. If a person with mental problems adopts an existing role, other people to know how to interact with them, thus helping to socialise the troubled person. It's well known that poets have poetic license, so people expect non-PC or unconventional behaviour from people who identify as poets.

Because manics are more likely to be isolated or drugged nowadays, for many people it's something of a novelty to listen to a manic. Their words can superficially sound creative. However, you don't need to be with patients long to know that the illusion soon wears off.

There are of course huge differences between a reader-manicpoet relationship engendered when reading a collection, and the kind of relationship one might develop with (say) a manic stranger on a long plane flight -

In real life, stuck on a plane, one politely makes allowances. Quirks and idiosyncrasies (e.g. beginning each contribution with "Er ..." or "Well ...", for example) are filtered out in a way that we're not used to doing when we read (Christopher Smart's ‘My Cat Jeoffrey‘ being an exception)

One tends to become tolerant of exaggeration during casual conversation. One might be expecting Truth and Illumination from a poet.

Though it's tempting in a book to assume that the persona is the person, that's far from always true.

On a plane, one can't easily walk away. Once one's bought a book one tries to justify the time and money spent, especially if the book's been recommended, but one can always stop reading

The stranger may not realise that they're coming over as egotistical and demanding. If the poet doesn't realise, then presumably the publisher should. Gratuitously unconventional language and subject matter means that the listener/reader will need to work harder. There's an added elitism in the poem situation - only poetry readers with editing skills will be able to benefit comfortably from the text.

When I was in my 20s a friend I'd known since school began acting strangely. For a while he was institutionalised, then he went into shared accommodation - "care in the community". I often visited. I got to know his new friends. Having had a rather sheltered, scientific upbringing I was interested and stimulated by the company. The subject matter was new to me (some of it eventually got into a prizewinning story of mine) but it was more the uninhibited mix of subject matter (and of reality/fantasy, public/private) that struck me. I transcribed the odd monologue. A mutual friend made video recordings that (heavily sampled) have become minor cult hits on YouTube. At that time I hadn't met any people from the creative arts, and was impressed by the imagination exhibited by my friend's friends, free from society's pressure to conform. That said, I grew increasingly bored of their rambling monologues and the repetition. I see the same free association and lack of inhibition in some poetry. I wonder sometimes if people enjoy it for the same reasons I liked those monologues all those years ago - for the novelty, the unacademic unstuffiness, the escapism.

I have bursts of writing between quiet periods during which the excesses of my writing phases are pruned. The writing's not manic, but I'm aware that the re-writing may remove the spontaneity and freedom of association that made the original interesting. So I can sympathize with manic depressive writers who don't want to change a word of their first draft, even those writers who during their depressive phases feel like destroying their work. But on the whole I'm wary of literature that has too many of the traits of manic writing. Poetry and social discourse are very different contexts with different expectations and norms of behaviour. But it's this very difference that readers should remind themselves of. Readers don't have the duties and responsibilities that carers bear. I suggest that they

be cautious about the impact of novelty, disorganisation and disinhibition - text that's sexually explicit or non-PC might appear striking and original in a poetry context, but in a wider context it might be common

consider what's lacking as well as what's in surplus

wonder why they're being made to work harder than is necessary, and wonder whether it's fair

remember that they can cut their losses and stop reading. Nobody's present whose feelings will be hurt

Friday, 5 August 2016

Assessing "Poetry Sales" isn't easy. Firstly it's not always clear what counts as poetry. Secondly, publishers often aren't forthcoming about sales, which rarely reach 4 figures and are usually part of a long tail. Some publishers give print-run sizes rather than sales, and count review copies as sales. And books on school/university reading lists may receive special treatment. e-books and web-publishing have complicated matters even further. I'd contend that poetry's never been popular, and that poetry's more popular than ever. It all depends of course on what you mean by "poetry".

Successes?

Was there ever, anywhere, a Golden Age of Poetry? Here are just a few of many candidates. I think fashion and lack of alternatives account for many of these highlights -

In pre-literate times, short and memorable passages were popular, often being set to music. I imagine that they spanned the literary spectrum, though I suspect that the equivalent of pop songs was by far the most popular type.

In Victorian times, many middle class parents felt they should have a poetry anthology on their shelves. Some evenings they may have taken turns to read poems out around the fire. A new book by Tennyson could sell 40,000 copies in weeks.

In 1965, the "International Poetry Incarnation" attracted 7,000 people to the Albert Hall.

Toyo Shibata was 92 when she started writing poetry; her first self-published collection of 42 poems has sold over 1.5 million copies in Japan since its publication in 2009.

According to The Academy of American Poets director Jen Benka, the Academy’s Poem-a-Day has over 300,000 readers.

Failures?

More often we hear about sale flops. Some of these stories may be apocryphal, but they're fun anyway -

Edward Fitzgerald paid to have 250 copies of the Rubaiyat translation printed, intending to sell each for 5 shillings. Something like a total of six copies were sold. After a couple years, the bookseller put it on the remainder table. Asking price: one penny.

Of the 2,000 copies of the 1832 edition of Wordsworth's poems, less than 400 had been sold by Sept 1833.

James Joyce's "Chamber Music" was published 1907. By 1913, fewer than 200 copies out of 507 printed had been bought, many by Joyce.

Jorge Luis Borges used to carry round copies of his book of poems and stuff them in the overcoats of men who were having a shave or a haircut.

According to Nielsen Bookscan, not one of the shortlisted collections in the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry had sold more than 1000 copies by 2008. "Hawks to Doves" by Alan Gillis had sold 39 copies.

Michael Juster's "Wilbur Award" winner, "The Secret Language of Women", has sold 400 copies in a decade - slightly above average for the series.

The best-selling single-author poetry book of 2011 in the US - "Horoscopes for the Dead" by Billy Collins - sold 18,406 copies.

According to The Guardian only 500 copies of Prynne's "Pearls That Were" were produced in England. On the plus side, in China a translation of it had sold more than 50,000 copies" by 2004.

Currently

In 1998-9 the UK Arts Council found that Faber published 90% of the contemporary poetry books that were bought. 67% of them were by Heaney, though his UK sales pale beside those of previous popular UK poets - Byron, Kipling, Betjeman, and Pam Ayres.

In The Guardian, 2013 it said that "total value of UK poetry sales has gone from £8.4m in 2009 to £6.7m last year", and that Salt (a publisher who had produces many single-author poetry books) found that sales had "a 50% drop over the last five years, half of which happened in the last 12 months"

But don't despair. Though most poetry books on middle-class shelves are unwanted presents ("Birthday Letters" is in many charity shops), I think quite a lot of poetry survives under other guises. A thoughtful passage can "go viral" nowadays, being read in hours more than a prize-winning poem is read in centuries. And song-writers shouldn't be underestimated. When Joni Mitchell began a track with "Blue, songs are like tattoos/ You know I've been to sea before" she was taking words seriously.

Attempts to widen the base of poetry have never been too successful in strictly poetry terms, especially those that use slogans like "Anyone can write". Perhaps the most recent successes are Dana Gioia's "The Big Read" and "Poetry Out Loud", which aim to increase appreciation of poetry. The current situation, where much worthwhile poetry isn't involved with establishment poetry (and might not even be called poetry) isn't the worst of all possible worlds. At least the writers don't have to make compromises.

Appendices

In the Mapping contemporary poetry report, these were the top 10 (in terms of value) all-time UK poetry titles (Non-contemporary poetry excluded)

Title and author

Copies sold

1 Staying Alive (Astley (ed))

90999

2 The World's Wife (Duffy)

67590

3 Collected Poems (Larkin)

40696

4 Beowulf: A New Translation

51694

5 The Whitsun Weddings (Larkin)

42579

6 Being Alive (Astley (ed))

27292

7 Birthday Letters (Hughes)

31227

8 If I Don't Know (Cope)

30776

9 New Selected Poems, 1966-87 (Heaney)

22775

10 Collected Poems (Plath)

16054

Eliot, Duffy, Armitage, Cope, Hughes and Larkin dominate the top 50 (the only other people to break in are Paul McCartney, Plath and Astley). After the top 50, sales are in four figures - e.g. Don Paterson's "Landing Light" (67th in the charts) sold 4,258 copies.

"Official figures from Nielsen BookScan show a sharp decline in the overall UK poetry market in the last year. There was growth of around 13% in 2009, when the market was worth £8.4m, followed by small declines in 2010 and 2011, and then a major drop of 18.5% volume and 15.9% value in 2012, when the overall value of the market fell to £6.7m." (Guardian 2013)

"Over the past two years, according to BookScan, the three bestselling UK poetry titles have all been by Duffy – "The Christmas Truce" (38,181 copies sold), "The Bees" (29,716) and "The World's Wife" (19,933). The rest of the top 10 is made up of three anthologies, "The Odyssey", the Pam Ayres' "Classic Collection" – and two more Duffy collections. The collected Philip Larkin comes in 13th place (10,152), behind more anthologies, and Seamus Heaney's "Burial at Thebes" in 14th (9,253). Even a prize-winning poet such as Sharon Olds has sold only 7,399 copies of her collection "Stag's Leap", while John Burnside's "Black Cat Bone" sold 5,544 copies." (Guardian 2013)

Tuesday, 28 June 2016

Many factors go into the production of a story or poem. Sometimes (as in tear-jerkers, say, or porn) one of these dominates, perhaps to the detriment of other factors.

One person's excess is another's lack. An excess of emotion can viewed be a lack of control. An excess of randomness could be viewed as minimal order. I suspect that in literature the amounts of each factor are measured relative to prevailing literary norms, mindful of genre and context. Because so many factors can apply to texts, an absence may well not be noticed, though excesses might well be. However, readers are likely to notice a related cluster of absent features.

Definitions of literary minimalism

"Literary minimalism" is quite a common term, though people used to Minimalism in other arts may be surprised by its usage in literature. In art, Minimalism is associated with non-figurative works, but in literature the term seems to apply to more mimetic works where the minimal amount of literary gloss has been applied.

According to Wikipedia, "Minimalism in the arts began in post–World War II Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s". "Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description". Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, and Samuel Beckett are cited as examples.

Herzinger suggested that its 'salient characteristics' include - “equanimity of surface, ‘ordinary’ subjects, recalcitrant narrators and deadpan narratives, slightness of story, and characters who don’t think out loud.”

Phil Greaney writes "I have translated these ‘salient characteristics’ into several more precise elements as they appear in minimalist writing: a reduced vocabulary; a shorter sentence; a reticence towards the expression of a character’s thoughts or feelings; unresolved, even slight narratives which reveal more than they resolve; the use of unadorned language and the rejection of hyperbole; a detached, even ‘absent’ narrator; a more abundant use of dialogue; fewer adjectives and, when used, not extravagant; showing, not telling as a primary means of communicating information; an interest in the accurate depiction of the everyday; and a focus upon the present tense".

Criticisms

In general the assumption is that the audience may need to work harder than usual to see the "artiness" of the work. The audience may need to be more sophisticated - "Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it
arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or
system" (Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text"). Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of minimal art in general.

John Aldridge’s "Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction" reflects a concern that the minimalist approach was banal, trivial and inconsequential, privileging form over effect: ‘[Minimalism] suspends all aesthetic innovation in favour of parsing out the most mundane concerns of superficial life’.

The hostility to Minimalism culminated in 1989, when five critics convened on Minimalism, and under the heading ‘Throwing Dirt on the Grave of Minimalism’, declared that it was ‘dead'.

Variations on a theme

Dirty Realism tends to have more lurid content than traditional literary minimalism, but shares its stylistic traits.

The New Puritans group emerged in the year 2000 with a manifesto that included style issues - "We believe in textual simplicity and vow to avoid all devices of voice: rhetoric, authorial asides";
"In the name of clarity, we recognise the importance of temporal linearity and eschew flashbacks, dual temporal narratives and foreshadowing" but also content-related issues - "As faithful representation of the present, our texts will avoid all improbable or unknowable speculations on the past or the future";
"We are moralists, so all texts feature a recognisable ethical reality". The movement doesn't seem to have lasted long - see Are litblogs making writers risk-averse? (A Stevens).

Specialised Minimalism

The term "Literary minimalism" doesn't seem to have been applied to Concrete Poetry (where words' conventional meanings are reduced). Barthes in "Writing Degree Zero" had perhaps this notion in mind when me saw poetic literature existing only in the "absence of all signs", a medium that expressed new, previously non-existent thought or images by questioning or expunging conventional ones. Neither is "Literary minimalism" applied to Prose Poems (where a major poetry indicator, the line-break, is excluded), Haiku, or Found Texts (where the minimum of literary gloss is applied). And what about "The Red Wheelbarrow" or the Blue Mountain poets, or even Larkin?

What a work of art studiously avoids can form an outline, a negative space around what readers have to deduce. Particular absences may be significant -

"For (Pierre) Macherey, a work is tied to ideology not so much by what it says as by what it does not say. It is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absences, that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt", Terry Eagleton, "Marxism and Literary Theory", p.34

"We tend to define our poets by that aspect of sensibility they actually must lack and strive towards", Jorie Graham, "Denver Quarterly", V 26, no 4

"The true artist may be best recognised by his acts of omission", Pater, "Appreciations with an Essay on Style", p.18.

Tactical Minimalism

By using more mundane language and situations, writers might be able to encourage readers to look deeper and wider for the aesthetic value, forcing them to re-calibrate their expectations so that they'll more alert to nuance. Displays of emotion can be all the more powerful for being understated or apparently repressed. However, like Art Minimalism, it can appear rather easy to do. What one reader might think is masterful restraint, another may see as a literary cop-out - the author avoiding the issue.

Thursday, 9 June 2016

In poetry reviews and blurbs, the terms "precise" and "precision" are commonly seen though their use is often vague. They seem to be terms of praise hinting at 2 main concepts -

Accuracy - The ability to judge this rather depends on shared understandings and mimetic intent. Is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" accurate? When Gerard Woodward writes "a toilet cistern refills like an old lady pouring tea" is he accurate?
If you see a fuzzy painting of a landscape, it could be the result of the artist's lack of attention to detail or an accurate depiction of a foggy day. How is one supposed to know?

Economy - "Precise" often means "small" or "clipped". When an artist captures a face with a few brushstrokes we admire the precision. Economy in poetry tends to involve word-count rather than line-count. 10 words spread over 5 lines is more likely to be considered "precise" than a 10-word sentence. Neither is the time taken by the reader taken into account. If twice as many words mean that a reader understands in half the time, there's a case for saying that the longer version is more efficient, more economic, but it wouldn't be described as more precise.

"Precision" to me can apply to big or small things. There needs to be a small margin of error - if the thing were different even in a small way, the effect would be significant. This concept of "precise" isn't the one that's usually applied to poetry, especially when line-breaks are praised for their precision. I think the economy of the image, more than its exactness, is what provokes the use of "precision", which is why haiku, short Imagist poems and short-lined short stanzas are most likely to attracted accolades for precision. A single, well-aimed (preferably striking) image can be more effective than carpet bombing, and an image can be made to look more significant than it is by being isolated.

The easiest situations to claim that words are precise are where other media have trouble competing at all, or where words' power of reference and allusion (rather than expression) can be exploited. The leverage of a phrase like "remember that night under the bridge in York?" can be large if there are shared understandings or if preparations have been made earlier in the text. A single word or name can be the key to a store-room of memories.

But if one wishes to be precise, why restrict oneself to using words? Words often can't compete with other media. In his novel, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", Dave Eggers includes a floor-plan - a more precise way of describing the house-layout than words would be. And a photo of a delicately coloured rose is going to convey appearance faster and more accurately than words.

The mouth of Franz Hals' "Laughing Cavalier" is a smear of red highlighted with
what looks like toothpaste. Close up you'd be hard pressed to say what the
marks represented. By 1851 that style was out of date. Late one summer's
evening, Millais rowed across a river to sketch the flowers on the far bank by
lamplight. You'll see those impossibly detailed flowers in the Tate's
"Ophelia". In contrast there's Picasso's drawings - bare lines on a white
expanse - and Schiele's work where areas of untouched canvas compete with
highly wrought flesh. Later still came hyper-realism, where painting aspires to
photography.

When a poet writes "he rowed across the river to paint flowers", readers are
trusted to fill in the details if they wish. It doesn't matter if they
erroneously think that daffodils proliferate on the riverbanks. The poet's
"flower" is that of a toddler's first doodle: a generic icon. If the writer
says that the flowers are "yellow", we wonder why that feature is emphasised.
Writers cannot mention without pointing, whether it's at objects or their
secondary properties. Because of that, poets have to be as careful as
pre-budget chancellors about what they say. Every word matters, but they don't
tell the whole story. In contrast, painters cannot paint mere "flowers" - they
have to be yellow, drooping, or windblown. Because there are always so many
details, none can be singled out.

The world's becoming more graphic, less poetic - we are offered a choice of
details to concentrate on rather than being trusted to fill them in. Any lack
is a vacuum that must be filled: we have to know the history of each killer,
interview those they knew at school, know in which beauty spot the body was
buried. If we mistrust what we see our response is to zoom in. There are always
more details to find, more trees to obscure our view of the woods. Yet we are
scared to get away from it all. Walking in the countryside, we take along our
binoculars, our mobile phones and Sunday papers. Even if we notice hosts of
daffodils we would no longer describe them as golden - in truth they aren't.
Yet facts are often no more than props for poets to feel their way into a poem,
scaffolding. Like an actor's false nose, they are as much for the performer as
the listener. Like experimental findings, they are useful only for what we can
derive from them. We are becoming obsessed by the fine print and the
appendices, forgetting the abstracts. Too many writers play safe by giving us
everything on the principle that more is better, betraying a lack of
self-confidence, an inability to select. The law of diminishing returns
applies, further details becoming exhausting rather than exhaustive, obscuring
rather than illuminating the original, squeezing the reader out of the text.
Picasso was right when he said that it takes a master to know when to stop.

Art ranges from Pure Abstraction to hyper-realism. Poetry too has abstract
forms (Schwitters' sound poetry for instance) but its range (excepting perhaps
dialogue) doesn't extend to the reproduction of the real world. Poetry has to
accept that it can present appearance little better than it can smells, that
because the natural world has to be translated into words, all aspects of
reality are equally available, equally distant. Poetry needs to combine the
untouched abstraction of "flower" and "summer" with the selective power of
adjectives, the pinpoint precision of quotation, and especially of proper
nouns. The blanket-bombing of Millais is absent. Instead, details are pruned
back to let the spaces speak, and lines define not just area but volume. Under
magnification the phrases and words may look mundane or even careless but the
pieces aren't meant to be observed in isolation. Each word is modified by its
context. Meaning is distributed, oblivious to word boundaries and even the
boundaries of the work. When a modern poet writes "golden daffodils" the extra
meaning isn't discovered by zooming in on the individual words, but by panning
out to take in Wordsworth's poem and our response to the Romantics. The measure
of a poem's precision is not the amount of detail it contains, but how well it
targets the factories of knowledge in the hinterlands of the reader's mind,
where the details are best left.

When I began researching to complete this article I discovered (not for the first time) that Jim Murdoch had already dealt with the topic in more depth than I can manage. He too points out that people often meant "concise" when they use "precise". The term was perhaps imported into literature when there was a trend for borrowing from technology - Futurism, Bauhaus, etc - but without the extremism of Minimalism. He also quotes Marianne Moore's "What is more precise than precision? Illusion". Magritte's train coming out of the fire-place needn't be any more realistically depicted than it is. Too much detail would distract. I think that even fuzziness has its uses -

One way to make something into art is to remove its purpose. A potter makes a cup so that someone may drink from it. Take away that use and viewers will look for other types of meaning. An instruction manual or a recipe can have its purpose and detail blurred so that only the rhetoric remains.

A blurred image can be more potent than a "precise" one because the details may be irrelevant to the effect, and the audience can fill in details themselves if they need to, personalised. A dark object at night is more scary if you can't see that it's a bush rather than a hunched figure. A photograph of Christopher Lee playing Dracula may be more effective if blurred so that you can't identify the actor, only the identifying characteristics of Dracula.

And the content may not be the most significant aspect of an intricate passage. It's sometimes useful to give a sense of precision in order to vary the texture - sweeping from grand abstracts to miniaturist detail can be effective, like jerking a microscope slide into focus.

Saturday, 21 May 2016

Woodcarvers use a natural material that has grain and knots. They could paint over their finished work, masking the irregularities. Alternatively, they could exploit them. A knot could become an eye. More often, the irregularities are used to create an independent source of interest. Artists might even choose a piece of wood with these effects in mind. Similarly, some painters don't mind their brushstrokes being obvious. Soutine for example didn't disguise the fact that his paintings were made of paint.

In the 1900s several architects and sculptors felt that the nature of the materials they worked with shouldn't be hidden. Henry Moore and others went further, claiming that certain materials suited certain purposes, that an art work should exhibit "Truth to Materials". The sculptor, Brancusi, believed that his art might "coax an image from within the material rather than forcing an image onto the materials".

In poetry the material is words. They have visual and sonic roots - letters and phonemes - so poets have two ways to demonstrate their truth to materials. Those two ways are related but not equivalent. Words with nearly the same letters often have nearly the same phonemes - "rough" and "tough" for example - though sometimes they don't - e.g. "rough" and "bough". Unless you're a crossword addict, words comprising the same letters aren't as strongly associated with each other as words that rhyme, but the option exists. An example is Jon Stone's "Mustard" where instead of each line ending in a rhyme they end with an anagram of "mustard".

Exploitation of these effects draws attention to the media. Just as varnish can accentuate the wood grain, so line-breaks can accentuate sounds. And as with wood, the effects can synchronize with the meaning or be largely independent of it ("The remarkable result of Valéry's treatment of sound and sense as consciously separated variables is that it allows the semantic components of the poem to take on structural value and the structural values of the poem to take part in a semantic or signifying action in turn" - "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982, p.55).

On woodworkinghistory.com it points out that "The truth-to-materials doctrine appears as a consequence of technological development", and that there are connections to the Arts and Crafts movement - a reaction against mass (non-individualized) production. Devoting attention to the material at the expense of the content would tend towards the appearance of craft rather than art, which when backed up by doctrine might lead to unsuccessful works, especially if the audience is unfamiliar with that type of art. Just as people without an ear (or the ability to integrate sound and meaning) might think sound effects obtrusive, so people who struggle with wordplay might over-emphasise its relevance, hinting at methodological similarities to Jewish mysticism (the Kaballah), or the poet's apparent psychological obsession with form over substance.

Perhaps Concrete poetry exhibits Truth to Materials. I prefer the example of Heather McHugh (Paul Muldoon uses wordplay too, but I find McHugh's work more approachable, her aims more conventional). According to her poetry foundation bio her "work is noted for its rhetorical gestures, sharp puns and interest in the materials of language itself". In her work the words often retain a trace of their origins, pun and wordplay used to advance the poem. Here's part of her "Language Lesson 1976"

On the courts of Philadelphia
the rich prepare

to serve, to fault. The language is a game as well,
in which love can mean nothing,

doubletalk mean lie. I’m saying
doubletalk with me.

and here's the start of "Ghoti" (a word GB Shaw invented)

The gh comes from rough, the o from women's,
and the ti from unmentionables--presto:
there's the perfect English instance of
unlovablility--complete

with fish. Our wish was for a better
revelation: for a correspondence

and yes, she's into anagrams - here's the start of her transliteration of Sonnet 23 (“As an unperfect actor on the stage”), where each line's an anagram of the original:

AS AUTHORS CAN’T PERFECT ONE AGENT

so e-agents can’t perfect an author.
His art (howbeit swapped shut) is his fire—

There are risks associated with this style. Once wordplay becomes a factor, readers may well think there's too much or too little of it. They might think it displaces (rather than augments) the content. Quite possibly they'll be distracted by the wordplay even if it augments. Flippancy is a common criticism; is it right to play with words when the poem's about a parent's death? One answer to that may be that the gulf between words and the world is so wide that any attempt to capture the notion of death in words is flippant, and exploiting the instability of language is mimetic.

McHugh (who had a poem in the New Yorker while a student) is not without her critics.

Hugh Seidman thought she sometimes "manipulates language to produce resonances of meaning without necessarily creating a psychological depth that might justify her insights and conclusions.".

Joshua Weiner (in The Boston Review) wrote that her "'will to be peculiar' (her own phrase for Dickinson) encourages a syntactic and semantic contraction into enigma; sometimes her jokes overkill. Such faults have developed among persistent strengths: in these formally distinctive, deeply felt, and intellectually challenging poems, McHugh has invented a style for herself that acknowledges the materials and contingencies of language without sacrificing poetry's primal resource in song."

She accepts that she is more sensitive to words than others are, possessing almost a type of synaesthesia. In an interview she said

You know, I never could tell things apart the way healthy people do. Meaning and means. Form and substance.

I was never very good at settling for any one sense of sense. So semantics became largely a matter of syntactics for me. Poems don’t make sense; they make senses.

My suspicion is that hers is the kind of cleverness that's currently unfashionable in the UK, where the voice is more important than the word. The academic voice isn't considered as revealing as the slightly deranged one.

Friday, 6 May 2016

With the rise of isms (deconstructionism, eco-feminism, post-colonialism) in recent years, literary theorists have rather neglected sound effects, often quoting Saussure's view that the sounds of words are arbitrary.

But they're not. Onomatopoeia and various other factors influence the choice of which sounds are used in a word (see "The Sound of Poetry and the Poetry of Sound"). If isolated sounds aren't arbitrary, still less are the sounds of sentences and poetry whose patterns produce effects that isolated words can't. Derek Attridge in "Peculiar Language" calls them nonce-constellations, writing that "The operation of nonce-constellations is probably more significant than genuine phonesthemes in onomatopoeic effects", citing John Hollander.

The significance of these patterns is unclear. In "Choosing between sound and sense" I quote from people like Bunting for whom sound was a generator of meaning, and from people like Valéry for whom sound was important but independent of conventional meaning.

These effects are in addition to the regular patterns of stress, rhyme, etc., that are used in Formalist verse. With free verse these dispersive, irregular patterns are the only patterns left. We lack the vocabulary to describe them well, and I suspect they often go unnoticed (at least consciously) by readers, but critics often pick them out. Here's an extract by Ruth Padel where she describes an easily missed pattern in Michael Longley's "Ceasefire"

Achilles, the key name, appears in every stanza. Its central syllable is repeated in the first stanza ("until", "filled", "building", with a sideways echo in "curled" ...), reappears in the second, resonates in the third with "built" and "still" (plus an echo in "full"). and reaches a climax in "killer": bringing out the fact that "Achilles" has the sound of that word "kill" in his name

"Bellflowers, seldom seen now, stellar, trim" comes from "Talisman", by Peter Dale. In Agenda 33.1, W.G. Shepherd wrote about the phrase -

Note the triple statement of the el(l) sound counterpointed against the duple m; the narrowing of el(l)'s vowel to ee and i - boldly interrupted by recapitulation of ow; and the modulation of s through st to t

Here's part of a review by Forrest Gander of Jorie Graham's "The Scanning" (Boston Book Review, Summer 1997)

We hear first the echo of "kiss" in "its" and "mathematics". But even before those three notes are reinforced by "hiss", "missed," "distance," and "pianissimo," Graham introduces a counterpoint, the growling consonance of "glint," "gripped" and "glides" and the long o's of "show" and "over". Look how the word "show" recollects the second syllable of "harrowing" from the second line, and prepares our ears for the deep vowels in "pianissimo," "telephone,"

Eliot's

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

is described thus by David Trotter ("T.S. Eliot and Cinema", Modernism/Modernity 13.2 (2006))

The intensity of Prufrock's arousal produces or is produced by an intensification in the verse. By comparison with its sparse and evenly paced predecessor ("and white and bare"), the line describing the hair on the women's arms seems positively swollen: the echo of "lamplight" in "light brown hair" and the internal rhyme on "downed" and "brown" fill it from within with the sameness of sound, with emphasis (p.243)

This kind of criticism raises various issues

whether all the perceived patterns exist - they may be the result of selective highlighting in the text. "Lit. crit. has a very bad record for selective quotation and selectively quoting supporting evidence while excluding all contrary data points." [J.C.]

if these patterns exist, are they accidental (i.e. are they as likely to occur in non-literary language)? Texts (particularly literary ones) will have bunched patterns of sounds. For example, while writing, one's short-term memory will contain recent sounds which may encourage the further use of those sounds, thus leading to clumping (echolalia).

Computer programs might be used to help resolve these issues, though quite what output they should produce is unclear. A few years ago I wrote a program that counted fricatives, plosives, end-rhymes, etc. It did quite well at identifying sonnets but it couldn't report on sound clusters. It could begin to convert these sound patterns into graphics. The graph below was an early attempt, showing the concentration of I (the bottom surface),
W and L (liquid) sounds in the 1st stanza of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard".

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
The lowing herd wine slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

The furthest edge represents line 1, the nearest edge (along the axis that runs from 0 to 10) represents line 4. Note the humps on the top surface at line 4, syllables 2 and 4 corresponding to 'leaves' and
'world' in the text. Note also the long ridges on the top surface along the 2nd and 6th syllable marks
- indeed, many of the 'L' sounds fall on stressed syllables. But such pictures don't show a landscape which corresponds to how the sounds affect me. Perhaps the graphs should emphasise stress and end-rhyme more than they do.